Night-o Route Challenge! Where would you run?

Jan Kocbach April 16, 2011 Orienteering News Comments Off on Night-o Route Challenge! Where would you run?

The Norwegian Craft Cup Night and the Swedish Champs night gave the runners some interesting challenges. Where would you choose to run on the first leg? This is O-Route Challenge: Part 3 2011.

About the O-Route Challenge: The Route to Christmas series has been very popular here at World of O the last years, and there have been many requests to offer some of these “O-puzzles” throughout the year. I have therefore decided to launch a similar series of “O-puzzles” throughout the rest of the year – at irregular intervals – named “O-Route Challenge”. I do not promise a lot of posts, but if time allows and I see interesting routes I will post them here.

The leg is as usually first provided without routes – you may take a look at it and think about how you would attack this leg (if the image is too small, you may click on it to get it larger). Remember that this is a night orienteering relay – with a lot of snow in the forest!

Webroute

Next you can draw your own route using the ‘Webroute’ below. Some comments about why you would choose a certain route are always nice for the other readers.

Now you can take a look at a graphical analysis of the leg based on the GPS-data (click on an image to see a larger version of it).

The first figure shows comparison of two different routes – the direct route and the route around to the right. As you can see, the route around to the right is definitely faster – the first part of the leg taking longer on the direct route.
By studying the second figure – which shows the pace of the two runners – you can see that for the direct route the speed is also slower for the last part into the control, because one do not run with the same confidence as when running the route around the route.
The third figure shows the routes of all tracked runners. The routes are colored in such a way that the fastest routes are green – the slowest are red. As you can see, there were quite a few mistakes on this leg – especially for runners choosing a direct variant. Knowing how different this terrain is at night, it is puzzling to notice how few take the rightmost route around the road.

Notice that the two top runners – Carl Waaler Kaas and Håvard Lucasen – both know that night orienteering is all about control – both taking the rightmost route.

Note that times are off the GPS, so there might be some inaccuracies at the start/end of each route/track.

Complete map

The complete map is available here in omaps.worldofo.com. The results are available here.

Proof: This was really difficult!

Take a look at Anders “King of the Night” Nordberg’s route in part of the course. Everybody could make mistakes in this terrain…

Swedish Champs night

To finish off, here is a webroute from the first leg in the Swedish Champs night. Very different challenges – but still very tricky. This is what makes the sport of orienteering so fun.

Next you can draw your own route using the ‘Webroute’ below. Some comments about why you would choose a certain route are always nice for the other readers.

The analysis for this one I leave to our Swedish reader….? See full GPS tracking here.